Pixelated Effect in Unity Shader Graph

If you are looking for any info about how to make a pixelated effect on any sprite in Unity, look no further. I’ll show you how you can do that using Unity Shader Graph.

To use Shader Graph in Unity, you have to have a project which uses Universal or High Definition Render Pipeline. If you do, then let’s get to work!

Create a graph ?

At the start, we should create a new shader graph. You can do this by right-clicking in the Project Window and then Create > Shader > Unlit Shader

Next, we should open a newly created graph and start playing!

To create a pixelated effect, we will use a UV node inside the editor. UV values are between 0 and 1, so to create the effect, we need to play a bit with math!

The easiest way to create such an effect is to multiply the value of UV but the number bigger and 1, then floor the values and divide it back by the same value.

This is how it can look like.

Create shader parameters ?‍?

We know how we want to create our effect, and now it’s time to add some additional parameters with which we can play.

Let’s start by creating texture and vector1.

I would recommend naming them “_MainTex” and “Pixelate” like I did.

Now, we should combine parameters and the effect together to make this shader work!

This is one way to make it, but there is another one.

Normalized parameters ?

It’s a good practice to normalize some parameters. So we won’t put some stupid values and break a game with them.

In our case, it would be cool to normalize the “Pixelate” parameter in our shader.

Let’s start by adding one more parameter “Max Pixelization” which will be another vector1.

Notice that I’ve changed “Pixelate” to be a slider!

Now, we can apply a new parameter in the graph. It will replace the current “Pixelate” param.

Result ?

Time to see the final result!

What do you think about it? Let me know in the comment section below! ?

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The whole project is available at my public repository. ?

Hope to see you next time! ?